established; and 2, the Incarnation was prepared. For the first purpose Jehovah laid hold of the Jewish nature, and with it commanded an external ecclesiasticism. Its self-love

was the fundamental selfhood of that Æon, and had nothing below it. In other words, the Jews were the worst race on earth; a religiosity was offered them; and more readily than any other nation they laid the flattering unction to their souls that they were the best race on earth, and the chosen of Jehovah. So outward holiness clave to them by delusion of their own corrupt nature. The necessity of them in this regard was made Divine use of, without violating their free-will; it was of the Rock of Ages; and was the Jewish Dispensation.

For the second purpose, an added Æon of iniquity was stored away, and, at the end, the race, more evil by the heredity of thousands of years, was again laid hold of by the mercy of Jehovah, the worst humanity being utterly indispensable here. The Lord Jesus Christ must come into the world; must be born. He came to redeem mankind from below upwards; and He could effect this only by coming. through birth into Evil's own chief country and capital. So He was born from Jehovah God as His Father by the conception of a Jewish Virgin. Therefore she had in her the heredity or transmitted nature of the most sinful race then extant. Redemption, reaching in the fulness of time to the deepest recesses of finite man, and in the spiritual world to the abyss of the hells, depended upon Christ's taking upon Himself a worst human nature which could be tempted by the Devil and Satan; that is to say, by the entire abyss. In vanquishing the empires of the Pit, He brought the Godhead into His natural humanity, as man in conquering his temptations to evil brings his religious conscience into his lower nature, and by his resistance makes conscience good there, and so far, by enduring to the end, regenerates his mind. Jesus Christ, by a process which our regeneration illustrates for us, made His Humanity divine;

namely by leading a divine life in it. And now we actually see and know God as God-Man in Him. This is the Incarnation, in which the Eternal Word, the divine truth, became flesh, that is, became a divine natural human heart, and a Divine Natural Man. Before this, Jehovah was present to the race as God-Angel through the heavens. In and after the Incarnation, He was in His own acquired person an Infinite and Omniscient natural man, historically memorable in the Gospels: visible, apprehensible, and loveable to all who keep His Commandments, and acknowledge Him as the source of all our virtue in doing so.

V.—WHY THIS PLANET WAS THE PLACE OF CHRIST'S REDEMPTIVE COMBATS.

The same reason for which Christ took upon Him a representative form of the worst natural humanity in the Jews, namely that He might redeem us from the power of hell, and in the end save to the uttermost, caused Him also as the Creator and God of all universes to make this planet earth the theatre of His incarnation. For this earth is to the immense system of worlds what the Jews were to the nations and peoples of the earth; it is the worst of worlds. Nothing short of conquering the worst, and by resisting its temptations and allurements, subjugating it, and so rendering it powerless to destroy man without his own complicity, could be a divine Victory over Hell and Death. Respecting the truths in this paragraph, see Swedenborg's Earths in the Universe. He informs us that

intelligence of the Incarnation which took place on our earth, was and is propagated by our inhabitants after death, consequently in the spiritual world, to all the planets of all the systems, and is thus known as Redemption and means of salvation to all universes. In the meantime, and always from creation, a divine influx gave to all mankind wherever

born, an innate knowledge of God as a Divine Man. The Gospel therefore now is written for the entire universe. From not knowing this fact, eminent men have rejected Christianity as being a tiny local system. Redemption is, however, coextensive with creation, and the publication of it co-extensive. The reader is recommended to peruse The Divine Order of the Universe as interpreted by Emanuel Swedenborg, with especial relation to Modern Astronomy, by the Rev. Augustus Clissold.*

VI. THE FIRST ADVENT.

Between the beginning and end of the Mosaic Dispensation, which was a state of perpetual decline towards evil, the deaths into the spiritual world had peopled its regions nearest to the earth with multitudes of evil spirits, who, when the Lord was born, were in dense masses between man and heaven, and of an influence so potent as to make allurements to wickedness irresistible, and to threaten Free Will with extinction. Such companionship has evil with evil here and hereafter. The pressure on personality was so overpowering that mankind was becoming a victim to demoniacal possession. These seductions, temptations, allurements, the Lord in His tempted Humanity confronted, beat them back, and trod them under His Divine feet; that is to say, under the new nature or natural which came down through the combats from the indwelling Divinity. This effected a Judgment in the spiritual world, and removed the obstructing sphere between heaven and man. It made new heavens and new hells, as Assizes on earth should make new security for order, and new imprisonment for disorder. Thus, by limiting the powers of evil to what sane mankind can resist if they choose, the Lord gave back Freewill to the race, emancipating it from Legion, and made man again one person under one God.

*London: Longman & Co., 1877.

This can be plainly understood by whoever studies it. There is nothing difficult about it, and nothing mysterious if you have full faith in an infinite Divine Man. And if you also know, which you easily may, that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. A divine life led on earth makes a divine natural man, as a natural life so led makes a natural man, a sensual life a sensual man, and a spiritual life a spiritual man. Το lead a divine life is impossible to a finite soul which comes from the seed of other men. The soul for this supreme experience must be God Himself, Deity Himself: the Seed, Divine Truth. "The Lord descended as the Divine Truth in Heaven." Divine Truth teaches what shall be divinely done. The field of personal evil is the place and plane of operation. This for the Soul; now for the body. The body must be conceived by a Mother who brings sinful humanity into the field of the battle. The Way is vastness of temptation for the one only surviving Man; namely, the Divine Man; temptation from the World, from the Universal Hells; and from the Universal Heavens for the heavens are not pure in the sight of the Lord; and Swedenborg by divine instruction tells that the Lord's inmost and most subtle temptations were from the angelic heaven. See the Arcana Cœlestia, n. 4295. The passage says: "In order that the Lord might restore the universal heaven to celestial order, he even admitted into himself temptations from the angels, who, in so far as they were in their own proprium or selfhood, in so far were not in good and truth."

Think then of resistance to temptation in the supreme cases and meanings as the Redemption of the Whole World by the Lord in His veriest real presence, making His humanity divine. The subjugation of the then overruling hells gave back to mankind the personal freedom of the Will which they had lost; and when the new freedom is used to resist temptation to evil as the Lord in His in

firm humanity resisted, then redemption finds its appointed end in salvation, or admission to heaven after death.

Whoever has resisted any evil delights to which he is prone, and fought against them, and persevered in resistance until they are no longer delightful but hateful, has in him the faculty of understanding from some experience how the better mind can come down into the seductive sensual, and become a new birth in it, exterminating the evil into circumferences at length beyond danger of recall. By this process the Lord wrought, and made faculty after faculty divine. He put on at length the Divine Sensual. He abolished in Himself the weight of the corporeal, and Death naturally disappeared, divinely-naturally,—before Him.

Jesus was of Jewish race by Mary, and He longed to gather that race into His fold. He says of Jerusalem, "How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not" (Matthew xxiii. 37). The Jews who rejected Him have now no part in His genealogy. He exterminated whatever was derived from the Virgin Mother; nay, He put off the heredity of the human race in his Resurrection and Glorification. He was not only no Jew, but no finite man in His ascension and union with Jehovah the Father, but one God in one adorable Person; practically adorable because comprehensible. His life on earth gave the human race for all worlds a finited image of Him, while the Word, which is the divine truth, gives the doctrinal verity of the Infinite Father indwelling in this approachable Son. So in His alone wisdom and mercy we can know Him as Friend and Brother, and adore Him as our one only God.

VII.—IMPLICIT ACCEPTANCE OF THE WORD DEMANDED.

This Revelation most literally taken and gathered from the whole letter of the Word, the written Logos, is a sun and